


An Everlasting Reverence

by EmeraldSage



Series: The Holiday Collection [27]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Angels, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Prompt Day 27: Snow Angels, RusAmeHoliday, Slight Religious Themes, Snow Angels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-11 20:59:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9022735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmeraldSage/pseuds/EmeraldSage
Summary: RusAme Holiday Prompt #27: Snow Angels





	

**Author's Note:**

> I was feeling oddly sad about this one.

           Laughter resounded through the street, bright and childish, and even the most sour faced of residents amongst the crowded residences couldn’t help the small smiles that were growing on their faces. The dust lay heavy on the sidewalks and street ways, the snow tinting a dark, sooty black as it melded with the pollution in the air before it settled on already dirty streets. The cleaning effort was a long time in coming, and hearing children enjoying the snow – as dirty, polluted, and hazardous as it was – was something relaxing and pacifying in the minds of the people. Of course, there were the parents who were worrying about their children ingesting the toxic snow, but most children knew well enough to not put the dirty snow anywhere near their faces.

            Parents who could afford it often took their children outside the main city, to the suburbs, where the air was cleaner and the snow was purer. The city government had yet to find a way to keep the coal foundry from polluting the air and the environment with its noxious fumes and hazardous waste, and the people who lived too close to the foundry itself grew more and more concerned about the fate of the children who grew up in this environment.

            Arthur Kirkland, a rising attorney in legal practice, was one of the more concerned parents, and at the head of the class action suit that was developing against the foundry, and the government’s lack of regulations to protect the people living around it and suffering. As a single parent, father of twins whose mother abandoned them on his doorstep one chilly December evening, Arthur was regarded with a modicum of contempt. It got worse when he met Francis Bonnefoy, a baker and an upcoming fashion designer, and fallen in love. While being a gay couple wasn’t uncommon in the cities, the areas they lived in disdained or outright reviled the two. Their children were treated either with pity or with disgust, and Alfred and Matthew had grown up knowing their community disliked them almost as much as their parents.

            But even so, Alfred and Matthew were good kids. Alfred was rambunctious, a regular little wild child with grand ideas and a golden heart. Matthew, while far more subdued, was no less ambitious and often followed his younger brother (“by 15 minutes Mattie!”) into all the tricks, twists, and plots he planned, if only to keep the younger blond out of some major trouble.

            One of his particularly troublesome acts had snuck them outside during the elder students recess, where they had run into a new and rather interesting friend.

            “ _Da_ ,” the new boy squeaked after Alfred’s never ending stream of babble had paused, and Alfred regarded him curiously, “I have only moved recently. I am from Russia.” The words were pronounced carefully, as if each one was considered before it had been said.

            “Where’s Russia?” the seven year-old wondered out loud, turning to his brother as if he knew the answer, before glancing back to the young Russian, “Is it near New York?”

            “No, Alfie,” his brother answered patiently, quietly, “It’s another country. Remember how Daddy talks about England? It’s probably in Europe somewhere.”

            Alfred lit up and practically tackled the elder boy, who startled, “That’s SO COOL! I like Europe! Not as much as America, though – we’re the best! But our _Papa_ ’s from Europe. And Aunty Eliza, and Uncle Gil, and Uncle Tonio, and Aunty Belle, and Aunty Alice, and Uncle Reilly, and…” Matthew took pity on the poor, overwhelmed new student and covered Alfred’s mouth with his own hand. Alfred continued on, seemingly not noticing the presence of his brother’s hand. Ivan just stared at the two of them, stunned.

            “Alfie,” Matthew interrupted again, and Alfred blinked blue eyes at his brother innocently, “recess is almost over.”

            Alfred gasped, scandalized. “We didn’t even make snow angels!” he cried in distress, before grabbing the hand of the new student and dragging him outside of the playground and towards the small sports field that lay covered in pristine snow that the other students had declined to desecrate. Ivan yelped in slight surprise, before letting himself be dragged away towards the snow. Matthew sighed in relief; it wasn’t him at least.

            Alfred, once he’d picked his way across the field and found a sufficient spot – for him – plonked himself down in the snow without a single care and started fanning his arms and legs out in either direction. Ivan watched him in curiosity, despite his familiarity with the action. After a moment, the younger child noticed his new friend wasn’t doing anything, and he pouted at the other.

            “You’re supposed to do it too,” he said matter-of-factly, and gestured for the other boy to sit in the snow next to him. Ivan did, and mimicked his gestures, mind casting back to when his sister had taught him and Natalia how to make angels of their own.

            _“Whenever it is snowing outside, God is listening to us. Because when we don’t know if there is an angel waiting and watching out for us, and we want to call one, we can go out into the snow and make snow drawings in their likeness._ ” Sister had said one cold afternoon, before they had all moved to America, “ _Angels love children, and they always protect them. That’s why children make snow angels the most; they believe the angels will take care of them, even if they don’t know what they’re really doing_.”

            “Alfred,” he said, and startled himself when he addressed his new friend. Blue eyes turned to him curiously, innocently, and he smiled when he asked, “Do you believe in angels?”

            Alfred’s face lit with confusion, then interest, and when he asked, Ivan began to speak. He spoke softly, slowly – making double sure that every word he said meant the right thing, so he didn’t mess this up – and told Alfred about angels; about what it meant to make snow angels, about how the angels cared.

            And when Alfred and his family moved away only months later, due to the escalating violence in the community against them, and the poisonous pollution that was building in the atmosphere and tainting the community, he kept that memory in mind.

* * *

            When they met, over decade later, Alfred was making a snow angel in the snow, tears dripping silently down his face. Ivan had seen him alternatively swearing at the sky and sobbing in the middle of his snow angel, and had recognized the brilliant, loud-mouthed, kind-hearted blond he’d once known. Matthew had been gotten involved with some of the wrong people and had walked in on something he shouldn’t have. He was in the hospital, and Alfred had spent every day since then praying to a God he didn’t quite believe in, pleading with the world to let his brother live. Ivan sat beside him for hours in the snow, holding him as he cried.

            When they met a year after that, Alfred had innocently fallen asleep in the park he’d been in, unaware of the snow that had started falling and collecting. Ivan had yanked him from the snow that had threatened to drag the young teenager into hypothermic temperatures.

            When they met in college – having somehow taken the same classes and enrolled in the same university together – Ivan asked Alfred to go out with him. Their first date was a horror movie – Ivan rather liked having Alfred clinging to him, though he could do without the ear-deafening screams – followed by a walk in the park. It had started snowing half way through the movie, and once they’d gotten out, Alfred had dragged the other out to a bank of pristine snow, much like he had the first day they’d met, and pulled him down to make snow angels on the ground.

            “You taught it to me, you know,” he said one day, playing with the cross he’d started wearing a few years back, when Ivan had asked about his attachment to the snow angels. “You taught me that God loved his children, that his angels were always watching us. Lord knew I didn’t believe it then, not with the things people spewed at us for being the children of two gay men. But…it gave me hope, then. That God didn’t hate us, even when I didn’t _believe_ in God. When Matt pulled through in the hospital, it was like a song of bells chiming in my head as the snow fell, and it was all I could think to do.”

            Alfred shrugged, biting his lip self-consciously, “It’s all I can do, sometimes.”

            And he understood.

* * *

  _When the nights grow cold,_

_When all I feel is the soul deep ache,_

_I stand on my knees in the snow_

_And wrap myself in Winter’s embrace_

_Into the darkness, I let myself go_

_To show you how I find your grace_

_How I know you’ll hear my words_

_Because this is how I pray_


End file.
